I'm Writing This With Words, Not Non-Verbal Cues
I'm violating my own cardinal rule of NaNoWriMo to write this entry. I stopped mid-chapter in the middle of a scene that I'm actually writing at a pretty good clip (up to 15,883 words) to "pick up" the Blogger. I always tell everyone who will listen (or isn't listening) that that's a simply brilliant way to kill your word count.
But I figure gathering my thoughts to continue writing is still doing something productive to the speed noveling end.
I keep having this reoccuring thought as I'm writing this latest scene. Kate has returned to the apartment to pick up her things to move out totally with Tabitha in tow to help. And I keep having flashbacks to my 2004 novel (which is, I haven't mentioned, still available in its entirety on LiveJournal as it was serialized). In that novel, Emily the FMC goes to Europe with Cassandra. Cassandra is the MMC's cousin as well as being Emily's best friend. Throughout the first part of the novel, which just like this one takes place after a breakup, Emily keeps having second thoughts about breaking up with Scott. Cassandra is always there to remind her that Scott is a douchebag (though I wrote that novel before douchebag was the word-du-jour) and why they broke up in the first place.
Well flash forward to the present time. In this scene Tabitha keeps reminding Kate that Andy is a douchebag as Kate has second thoughts about breaking up with Andy.
That's not the big problem though. The bigger dilemma is that Tabitha is quickly turning into Cassandra. She's adopting her mannerisms and everything. The big difference is that Tabitha is artsy and Cassandra was just, for lack of a better adjective, slutty.
I think their motivations are going to turn out to be incredibly different. It turns out that jealousy is Cassandra's driving force. I'm not sure what Tabitha's force for trying to keep them apart is yet. Maybe it's entirely altrusitic. Maybe she can just see, as hopefully the reader can, that "those two just weren't meant to be together." In the 2004 novel, Scott and Emily were, or at least I tried to write them as meant to be together once they got their own crap together.
So there are major differences but I still can't help but think that anyone who read my 2004 NaNo is going to think I'm just repeating myself.
I said I wanted to return to my roots for this one but I didn't mean in that way.
---
At the Chicago International Film Festival, my friend Samantha and I went to see "The Age Of Ignorance." This is the new film by the French-Canadian director Denys Arcand. He's the guy who won the Oscar for "The Barbarian Invasions" (well deserved because that movie was all sorts of awesome).
At the Q&A session afterwards, an audience member accused him of writing weak, unlikeable female characters. He tried to defend himself saying that his female characters were deeper with better motivations than the audience member gave him credit for.
I hope to never be in that situation (though it's doubtful this novel will see and audience of more than three or four people tops) but I want to defend myself in advance.
I've always tried to write female characters as stronger than their male counterparts, just in different ways. Someone reading this novel might chastise me for making Kate a bit touched (to put it nicely) just like Emily suffered from clinical depression. And they'd further state their case by saying that Tabitha is just controlling and slightly one dimensional.
I'd like to point out that in my 2005 novel, it's Mia (the MC's girlfriend) who holds everyone together and is the voice of reason and not Liam (the MC) who sort of bumbles through life while thinking he knows it all.
Sure Kate is just about bat crap insane at this point in the story and sort of wishy-washy in maybe wanting to take Andy back but I'm not trying to make her a weak character. After all, she had the strength to walk out in the first place (which the girl that she's not really based on was really proud of).
I just write characters with issues. All my characters may be a little weak in the grand scheme of things, male and female. I just don't know any Harrison Fords or Glenn Closes in my real life who are ready to take on the world and make it their oyster. All the people I know have flaws. It's those flaws that make us human.
To write otherwise to me seems really dishonest (as would making my characters infinitely likeable).
---
Before I start tangenting again to entirely forget what I wanted to write on yesterday, I'm going to get down to it.
Dialog.
As I've mentioned, my friend Samantha is NaNoing this year (at least I think she is - she's yet to recover her word count after her laptop got stolen from her apartment a few days ago). While we were driving on Saturday to see my friend Adam's play, she confessed that she hadn't written any dialog in her first 3,000 words or so.
I was shocked. Dialog to me is the most beautiful part about writing. To think that some people are scared of it or avoid it for other reason befuddles me.
But, lo and behold, Samantha is not alone in this fact. I found an entire thread on the boards questioning if dialog is even necessary. I can't find it now (too bad NaNoWriMo has taken down the find people by where they've posted for now) but there were seriously a third of the people in the forum who said, "don't worry, you don't need dialog."
Um, what?
I mean, there's non-verbal communication and it's a crucial part to storytelling but an entire novel, NaNo or not, without dialog is not worth the paper it's printed on. No one, and I mean no one, cares about a novel that says, "they did this and then they did that and then this happened."
While an insanely high amount of communication is non-verbal, human beings communicate with words.
On the positive side, I have this to say. To anyone who's afraid to write dialog because they think it sounds inane - humans talk inanely. Now there's a point where the dialog becomes really bad and that's at "hello." The problem is never the dialog, it's where the dialog starts and stops. It's been my experience that dialog should advance the plot in the same way that action does. If you don't mention someone walking every stop, don't include the greetings and the goodbyes.
Other than that, pretty much everything is fair game.
And I guess if you want to write a dialog-free novel go ahead it's your NaNo. I'm just not swapping with you.
---
Well that was sufficiently negative.
To close this on a more positive note, here's a link to an awesome video that I got off the Chicago boards. It was posted in response to a post by our ML (and since today is ML appreciation day, can I just say that TimSimms is doing an outstanding job with Chicago) and I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.
One person at work actually said it was the funniest viral video she had ever received.
Now that I hyped it up, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBHOL1PcPR8
There's proof that dialog doesn't have to be even slightly human to be human. Enjoy!
But I figure gathering my thoughts to continue writing is still doing something productive to the speed noveling end.
I keep having this reoccuring thought as I'm writing this latest scene. Kate has returned to the apartment to pick up her things to move out totally with Tabitha in tow to help. And I keep having flashbacks to my 2004 novel (which is, I haven't mentioned, still available in its entirety on LiveJournal as it was serialized). In that novel, Emily the FMC goes to Europe with Cassandra. Cassandra is the MMC's cousin as well as being Emily's best friend. Throughout the first part of the novel, which just like this one takes place after a breakup, Emily keeps having second thoughts about breaking up with Scott. Cassandra is always there to remind her that Scott is a douchebag (though I wrote that novel before douchebag was the word-du-jour) and why they broke up in the first place.
Well flash forward to the present time. In this scene Tabitha keeps reminding Kate that Andy is a douchebag as Kate has second thoughts about breaking up with Andy.
That's not the big problem though. The bigger dilemma is that Tabitha is quickly turning into Cassandra. She's adopting her mannerisms and everything. The big difference is that Tabitha is artsy and Cassandra was just, for lack of a better adjective, slutty.
I think their motivations are going to turn out to be incredibly different. It turns out that jealousy is Cassandra's driving force. I'm not sure what Tabitha's force for trying to keep them apart is yet. Maybe it's entirely altrusitic. Maybe she can just see, as hopefully the reader can, that "those two just weren't meant to be together." In the 2004 novel, Scott and Emily were, or at least I tried to write them as meant to be together once they got their own crap together.
So there are major differences but I still can't help but think that anyone who read my 2004 NaNo is going to think I'm just repeating myself.
I said I wanted to return to my roots for this one but I didn't mean in that way.
---
At the Chicago International Film Festival, my friend Samantha and I went to see "The Age Of Ignorance." This is the new film by the French-Canadian director Denys Arcand. He's the guy who won the Oscar for "The Barbarian Invasions" (well deserved because that movie was all sorts of awesome).
At the Q&A session afterwards, an audience member accused him of writing weak, unlikeable female characters. He tried to defend himself saying that his female characters were deeper with better motivations than the audience member gave him credit for.
I hope to never be in that situation (though it's doubtful this novel will see and audience of more than three or four people tops) but I want to defend myself in advance.
I've always tried to write female characters as stronger than their male counterparts, just in different ways. Someone reading this novel might chastise me for making Kate a bit touched (to put it nicely) just like Emily suffered from clinical depression. And they'd further state their case by saying that Tabitha is just controlling and slightly one dimensional.
I'd like to point out that in my 2005 novel, it's Mia (the MC's girlfriend) who holds everyone together and is the voice of reason and not Liam (the MC) who sort of bumbles through life while thinking he knows it all.
Sure Kate is just about bat crap insane at this point in the story and sort of wishy-washy in maybe wanting to take Andy back but I'm not trying to make her a weak character. After all, she had the strength to walk out in the first place (which the girl that she's not really based on was really proud of).
I just write characters with issues. All my characters may be a little weak in the grand scheme of things, male and female. I just don't know any Harrison Fords or Glenn Closes in my real life who are ready to take on the world and make it their oyster. All the people I know have flaws. It's those flaws that make us human.
To write otherwise to me seems really dishonest (as would making my characters infinitely likeable).
---
Before I start tangenting again to entirely forget what I wanted to write on yesterday, I'm going to get down to it.
Dialog.
As I've mentioned, my friend Samantha is NaNoing this year (at least I think she is - she's yet to recover her word count after her laptop got stolen from her apartment a few days ago). While we were driving on Saturday to see my friend Adam's play, she confessed that she hadn't written any dialog in her first 3,000 words or so.
I was shocked. Dialog to me is the most beautiful part about writing. To think that some people are scared of it or avoid it for other reason befuddles me.
But, lo and behold, Samantha is not alone in this fact. I found an entire thread on the boards questioning if dialog is even necessary. I can't find it now (too bad NaNoWriMo has taken down the find people by where they've posted for now) but there were seriously a third of the people in the forum who said, "don't worry, you don't need dialog."
Um, what?
I mean, there's non-verbal communication and it's a crucial part to storytelling but an entire novel, NaNo or not, without dialog is not worth the paper it's printed on. No one, and I mean no one, cares about a novel that says, "they did this and then they did that and then this happened."
While an insanely high amount of communication is non-verbal, human beings communicate with words.
On the positive side, I have this to say. To anyone who's afraid to write dialog because they think it sounds inane - humans talk inanely. Now there's a point where the dialog becomes really bad and that's at "hello." The problem is never the dialog, it's where the dialog starts and stops. It's been my experience that dialog should advance the plot in the same way that action does. If you don't mention someone walking every stop, don't include the greetings and the goodbyes.
Other than that, pretty much everything is fair game.
And I guess if you want to write a dialog-free novel go ahead it's your NaNo. I'm just not swapping with you.
---
Well that was sufficiently negative.
To close this on a more positive note, here's a link to an awesome video that I got off the Chicago boards. It was posted in response to a post by our ML (and since today is ML appreciation day, can I just say that TimSimms is doing an outstanding job with Chicago) and I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.
One person at work actually said it was the funniest viral video she had ever received.
Now that I hyped it up, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBHOL1PcPR8
There's proof that dialog doesn't have to be even slightly human to be human. Enjoy!
posted by incendiarymind at 8:09 PM
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